Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

     I am fairly certain that everyone involved in education is currently looking forward to the end of this academic year. This includes students, teachers, and administrators. I submitted the last of my final grades yesterday so I am officially done, with the exception of a few meetings. My biggest takeaways from this semester are in the paragraphs below.      Clear communication with students is the key to having a smooth semester. One thing that I do every day of class, either before class or after class, is to put the homework assignment as a News Item in the learning management system (LMS). In addition to this, I usually rearrange the placement of the items on the home page of the course in the LMS so that the News Item is front and center. This assures my students of where to look for their homework assignments every day. Once that date is over, I archive the News Item so they are only seeing the one that is currently relevant. I started this pract...

Teachers are, in my opinion, selfless heroes. They are often unappreciated and underfunded. Ask any teacher and they will tell you that they are not in the classroom because of the money, the appreciation, or the respect, but because they genuinely care about the learning and well being of every single student in their classroom. They care about each student that comes through their classroom. Teachers also do not just care about a child for a year, but for a lifetime. These teachers will go above and beyond for their children, and that is exactly how they see their students. Each student is an extension of their family. Every year when a teacher gets a new class, they get a new set of children that they will laugh with, cry with, worry about, and, most importantly, love as their own child. They spend eight hours every day talking to, teaching, and engaging with these kids. Yet, they are underappreciated. When a student is hurting, so is his teacher. They want to help fix their p...

This title may seem daunting. We are teachers. Of course, school is important! But is it the most important thing? During this once in a lifetime (hopefully) pandemic, I have realized that school is not the most important thing. With all that is happening around us, it is difficult to focus on school when it seems so miniscule to everything else going on. While death and sickness rates continuing to rise, it seems odd to pursue grades the way we were before. Some teachers have backed off and realized that there are bigger things in our life going on, but some teachers have not. While online remote learning appears to be the only option, that does not make it an easy option. Students went from doing schoolwork in places such as the library or in quiet buildings. Now, they have to do schoolwork in their homes, where it may not be that quiet and they may not have a table to set up on. For some students, the only safe place they could go was school. Not only was this taken away from them...

          Have you ever wondered who the most selfless people are on this planet? Have you ever thought who else is going to help your children become successful adults someday? Have you ever contemplated which occupation is the most thankless, but the employees don’t seem to mind? Well, I’ll tell you right now, the answer to all three of those questions is teachers. Here’s another question: why do people want to become teachers?             As a current student at South Dakota State, I have looked back on my days in high school, but not to reminisce about what I did. I look back and focus on what my teachers each brought to the table. No teacher is alike, and I think that’s a very good thing. You need a variety of different personalities to have a successful school, in my opinion. But they all have the same objective in the long run: to give their students the tools necessary to be su...

I sometimes forgot how young I actually am, and there are moments in my life where my age shows through. The other day it dawned on me that I am part of an exclusive group--a group is one that doesn’t remember the days before cellphones. I do not know when exactly cellphones were invented or became more attainable, but I do know that as long as I’ve been alive, they have been around. I also realized my lack of age talking to my mother. She starting talking about what I’m going to call a party landline. Essentially, your neighbors could hear your conversations if they picked up the phone while you were chatting with somebody else. I can’t imagine that: a life with no cellphones, not to mention life with a landline that’s not even exclusively your own. Not to mention, emails have also been around my entire life, but that’s pretty new as well. Back in the old days, where there were cars with carburetors, you had to send mail through the post office. I honestly do not even know how to se...

There has been a lot going on in the past couple weeks. Colleges and universities all over the U.S., as well as worldwide, have been closed. Public schools in 30 states, with the count continuously rising, have closed their doors. This leaves more than 50 million kids from elementary to high school at home without structure and sometimes supervision during the day. This can be so overwhelming to think about and I completely sympathize with peoples’ fears, but the way that teachers have responded and reacted gives me so much hope. Crises foster innovation. For teachers of a traditional learning classroom, online applications may have never been used. Teachers in schools without one-to-one access have rarely had to help students with using laptops or tablets. This can be seen as a hardship, or as an opportunity. Now is the time to develop the amazing technology that we have into our daily classrooms. Now is the time to learn the right and wrong ways to use ...

This topic is one that hits close to home for me, and it is one that I do not look forward to dealing with when I am a teacher. Before I go on I must admit that I am very guilty of being a letter chaser. A letter chaser is someone who goes to school with the mindset of putting more emphasis on getting an A rather than learning the material. After my four years of high school and now into my second year of college I have learned the power of learning instead of chasing the letter. From the very beginning of high school I was always told that A’s were the goal, and doing the extra work would pay off in the long run. Well this might be true, and I am not so naive to think that grades don’t play a factor in getting into colleges and other life impacting areas such as scholarships and awards. However, in this post I hope to give you a different mindset the next time you find yourself chasing the letter. Like I mentioned above, I am a letter chaser. I am your stereotypi...

Once upon a time, there were no public schools. Once upon a time, it was not the job of the government to teach our young people. Once upon a time, it was the parents’ job to teach and train their children not only life skills (which many public schools insist on teaching) but career skills. The blacksmith would give his child on the job training in the art of blacksmithing. The baker the same to his child. The merchant the same to his. But then man invented the factory. Before the human race decided to sophisticate itself, there were only experts. Professional degree training began at age six and ended whenever they decided it was over. Now, I by no means disapprove of the good fruit the industrial revolution granted humanity, but some of the bad fruit is still laying around. Our current public schools system is designed to produce a factory worker, but society no longer is in need of factory workers. Many of the people who manage to escape the factory mindset of school are hard...

In today’s day in age, it is so common for students to walk into their math classroom and expect nothing more than a lecture with a homework assignment to go along with it. I, along with many others, have experienced this in my life. Day in and day out, we take notes on a PowerPoint the teacher has made and do an assignment straight from the textbook. Everyone can agree that this can get boring and repetitive, no matter how much you love math. This can create a very black and white environment for your students that is not promoting any creativity. Educators of Mathematics can have a powerful influence by making math FUN and may even give some students a newfound love for math. There are many ways that educators can make your classroom setting more enjoyable for students. One important way is to share their passion. If you aren’t excited about what you are teaching, why should your students be? We can change the way our students talk about math just by setting an example. I have s...

Proof:   First and foremost, I absolutely demise doing proofs. I look at them, I think, I go to a different problem, I come back, think, go to another problem, then finally muster up an answe r to the proof, and to be blunt, the success rate has been dismal of late. But, although I wish I would do better when being tested on it, it is extremely important  in a math class to learn proofs and  learn  how to do proofs for a variety of reasons.     The main reason is glaringly obvious; it shows the student has an overall understanding of the subject at hand.  This understanding is on a different level than just computing numbers. When a student is given the Pythagorean Theorem and is asked to find the hypotenuse of the right triangle, do they really understand where everything is com ing from, or are they just simply taking the example the teacher gave and applying it to their situation. When I was a high school student, I did the latter. My teac...

              Today I went to the SD STEM Conference in Huron, SD. There were many great sessions, but the ones that interested me the most were the ones with the idea of standards based grading (SBG) or target based grading (TBG). I have never really been exposed to this kind of grading, since none of my teachers have used it. If you’re not familiar with SBG or TBG, standard based learning has to do with grading based on the standards and not as much on necessarily getting the right answer. Target based learning is very similar to standard based grading, but it mostly breaks down the standards into smaller “targets”. These two grading systems are also usually out of a 4-point grading scale.               The TBG session was given by Mr. Kreie. He has just started using this system this school year. He says that this kind of grading focuses on “I can…” an...

             As future educators we will run into all kinds of different students. There will be students that can be discouraging and hard to deal with as a teacher. I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of time substitute teaching so I’ve got to see some of this firsthand by subbing in the in-school suspension room. I saw students who were smart, personable, and had all the tools within themselves to succeed in school and do whatever they wanted to in life. But, despite that, they were failing all of their classes and it felt like there was nothing I could do to convince them to try. If you could get them to try for even part of a day, they did great on their tests or assignments despite not going to class often.              Watching students make decisions like this was hard for me, even as somebody who was just a substitute. I spent a week working in the in...

Imagine a school in which the teachers and administrators expected nothing from you. You don’t want to graduate? Okay, that’s fine. You don’t want to show up to class? Okay, that’s fine too. Now, some students may think “oh man, this is the best school ever.” But what if school is the only place you can go in order to get a meal to eat? What if school is the only safe place for you to be at? What if school is the only place where you feel important and cared for? Would you still want this? Cruz showed up on Coach Carter’s doorstep one night after his cousin was shot on the street. It was the only place he felt he could go in order to get out of this lifestyle and be safe. Cruz is a character in the movie  Coach Carter  who lives in a life of poverty, drugs, and gangs. In one of the scenes towards the end of the movie Cruz said to Coach Carter, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not ou...